New York Times Moves On And Appoints New Executive Editor

Presidential PardonThe New York Times, trying to move past the last few months of scandal, has now appointed Times columnist Bill Keller, a former Times managing and foreign editor, as its executive editor. Howell Raines stepped down as executive editor early last month in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal over fabricated and plagiarized stories. Keller says he's honored and exhilarated to fill the position and to "lead the finest assembly of journalists in the world." Meanwhile, the Times now says a story it published last week was "not fair" and that "beyond the inaccuracies arising from the article's mistaken premises there were other factual errors." The Times had said TVT Records President Steven Gottlieb "has lost control" of his company and "has a reputation as a litigious music executive." But the Times now says Gottlieb "remains in full control of his company" and that "a review of the legal cases and the facts indicates that it was not fair to describe Mr. Gottlieb as litigious."

Media Poll What to make of a new Pew poll about the media? On one hand 62 percent of Americans interviewed said that news organizations are best described as "highly professional." Plus, 52 percent said the media "protect democracy" and 68 percent believed news organizations care about how good a job they do. Yet, 62 percent of those questioned believe news organizations try to cover up their mistakes. Fifty-three percent believe news organizations are politically biased. By the way, 51percent described the media as liberal, 26 percent believe the media are conservative.

Compact Campaign Late last week, this news organization and others ran snippets from a commercial blasting the Bush administration produced by MoveOn.org. There was a feeling this was newsworthy partly because it touched on this issue of whether Iraq tried to acquire Uranium Ore from Niger and partly because MoveOn.org claimed it was going to be buying airtime to broadcast the ad. We followed up today and learned that so far, that ad buy has been rather small – $40,000. The ad is now being seen on a couple of cable systems in the D.C. area and one cable system in New York City. This means -- this time at least --- far more people saw the ad during our news coverage than will likely ever see it in a regular commercial time slot.